Maybe it's because employers want >2 years experience from people straight out of college, and no one wants to train. Companies claim they don't want to train because you could just leave (at will) but it's relatively simple to draw up a contract that employees must pay back training costs if they don't stay at least a year or two.
Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
41–50 of 130 posts
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#42When you give every kid a trophy, they all think that they are winners. We have raised a generation of children who have been infantilized and sheltered throughout their childhood and college years. The inevitable result, unfortunately, is a generation of adults that lack the ability to tackle adversity, think critically, or make valid self-assessments (something that is difficult even for the most enlightened). We have a system of social and academic promotion that has virtually no relation to objective metrics. Many universities (and law schools), even the most prestigious, are eliminating objective admission standards because so many applicants are unable to meet them. Its no surprise that those who have been conditioned since birth to believe that they are entitled to "achievements" have an inflated view of their abilities. The steady decline in literacy, critical thinking, and overall competence (from already low historical levels) mirrors the steady decline and atrophication of our society as a whole.
http://college.usatoday.com/2016/07/18/columbia-and-barnard-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/03/0...
https://www.fairtest.org/schools-do-not-use-sat-or-act-score...
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#43Others have mentioned the vagueness and low value of the questions, but I'm particularly struck by the professionalism/work ethic one.
Professionalism is tough, because we define it (roughly) as seeking the common expectations for the role, but one of those expectations is "professionalism".
And "work ethic"...Im a gen Xer and I feel like millennials are getting dumped on more than the normal generational strife, to a very unfair level. (Example: I see a lot more snowflakes and need for "participation trophies" among those complaining about such things than among the millenials themselves)
Which leads me to wonder, particularly with work ethic, is it the students or the employer that have the unrealistic expectation?
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#44I'm always a little skeptical of these sorts of surveys because it's hard to tease out what people believe about themselves because it's true vs. what people believe about themselves because it's useful . I remember that when I was a new grad, there was a very large part of myself that held a realistic appraisal of my abilities and was therefore scared shitless about my ability to make it in the working world. I was…
Had the exact same thought coming here, couldn't have said it better.
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more... I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.
I would feel comfortable delivering production code in: Php, Java, ruby, python, javascript, SQL, perl, pl/sql, and bash. And have been paid to write them all over my career. Not saying I wouldn't need a day or two to brush up on some of them (perl was pretty early in my career), but 6 languages isn't that large a number once you've been around for a decade or two, especially if you consult.
Used to use 6 languages in the course of a day, in the before times, before JavaScript took over.
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more... I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.
OK, I might have a couple more languages than the average mid-career developer, but I don't think I'm that much of an outlier. So here goes. I have, in the past 10 years, professionally and successfully worked with C++, Scheme, Ruby, a couple generations of JavaScript and Rust. And I've written a whole pile of shell scripts. These were all "first tier" languages in which I was up-to-date at the time. I've also, as a…
Given your breadth of experience, I actually bet you could get very comfortable with Elixir in a week's time. Especially so if you've worked with Scheme, Ruby, and Haskell. Elixir's syntax is very simple, and 90% of your code is data transformation steps strung together with pipes, which really isn't any different from other (functional) languages.
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#47Or the short version employers don't want to train new graduates even less than they did a generation ago.
The increase of degree required jobs means that organisations that used to take highschool leavers at 16 or 18 and train them now think that university should do all the vocational training - they are also not getting the top quartile of grads either.
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#48Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract. Its what I paid you for right? Naturally, they answer with high confidence in their readiness. People who have worked a long time are in part answering for themselves. They look back at how much they've learned, changed, and developed. How much they had to learn on…
There is lack of faith that people can learn another Angular version even. You have experience wih 1.6?! We do TS+Angular 4 over here, sorry mate! Such companies are simply not hiring - bragging, teasing, probing the market perhaps - but certainly not hiring. Not only the framework landscape is broken but as well people are extremely anal about their preferences and choices.
And what is the half-life of the latest and greatest frame work any way :-)
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#49Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract. Its what I paid you for right? Naturally, they answer with high confidence in their readiness. People who have worked a long time are in part answering for themselves. They look back at how much they've learned, changed, and developed. How much they had to learn on…
> But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more... I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.
mm ok ill bite
Fortran,BASIC,Perl,PHP,ASP,PL1/G Plus MySQL and the procedural languages T/SQl and PL/SQL.
Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more... I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.
There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax That is true but on the other hand, vast swathes of commercial work boils down to, use a language ultimately derived from ALGOL to process data structures that were in textbooks in the '70s. All the libraries are ultimately written by people, and people who themselves have used other languages, so variations are pre…
I though ALGOL was a 60's language